The reader could flip to the next page by swiping a finger across the screen from right to left, and jump to the index by swiping up. Nowhere in the demo did a scroll bar appear. On the desktop, a user could navigate with a mouse, or with the arrow keys and the page-up or page-down keys, or with a pop-up navigator.

Of course, an ambitious webmaster could render the look and feel of a multi-column newspaper today, but it would involve writing a lot of HTML and possibly some JavaScript. By contrast, GCPM will offer a number of controls that can be easily added to the stylesheet.

"Authors should be able to [create pages] without having to hire expensive app developers, and do it in languages they know and in code they recognize," Lie said. "It doesn't take much code to do this."

An obvious market for the technology would be that of book and periodical publishers, who could redesign their websites to look like their printed editions, Lie said. They could even use CSS as the common code-base for all the editions of their products. Beyond the publishing industry, the stylesheet extension could also help Web application developers build apps that more closely resemble native desktop and mobile applications. .

"We're putting this out as a 'lab build' to let people play with it," Lie said.